I enjoyed being an active angoleiro at the ECAP for some years. I learned quite a few things there, thanks to Mestre Guarà and the nice galera he gathered around him. As I had some spare time, I offered to maintain the school’s website. It had been built by a former student using SPIP. This was an interesting experience, but technically speaking it felt more like patching a sinking boat, than actually administering a website. When I took over in 2007, most of the scripts were written in php3… But it worked, and Guarà and I kept it working some more time. I reviewed the scripts for compatibility, managed to upgrade SPIP to a newer version, added a media player, and an agenda.

I’m no longer doing capoeira. I feared that the site would break some day, and I knew it had accumulated so many hacks that a new webmaster would have had a hard time to take over. So in summer 2014, I set to rebuild the site from scratch using Joomla 3. This replaced the SPIP version and is the one currently online.

Guarà manages the contents by himself. We worked together to ensure the simplest workflow for that. I also tried to stick as much as possible to "raw" Joomla 3. For example, the template is a mod of the default protostar, rather than one of those fancy templates with many buttons to facilitate admin’s work, but which require a whole "framework" to run. When Guarà finds a new tech admin, that guy’s part should be easier, I hope, since there is really no idiosyncratic logic here to understand. Also, the list of extensions to update is pretty minimal.